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Rooting for Fighting Irish, Even While at Duke

What makes you fall head over heels in love with a team? The usual fairy tale involves fathers and hometowns and afternoons spent at the ballpark, a closeness that rarely happens in other contexts.

I didn’t have that as a child. My father used to take us to watch Yale play football, but he was more interested in the singing and the camaraderie than the game, which perplexed me.

“How come the Yale quarterback can’t throw a spiral?” I asked him when I was 6 years old and enduring another arctic Saturday at the Yale Bowl. He was too busy belting out, “Bulldog, bulldog, bow-wow-wow, Eeeeeee-li Yale!” to hear what I was saying. This singing-school-songs thing must be a gene I did not inherit.

The story of how I fell for my team — and why it has stuck with me until middle age and probably beyond — starts a year or so later. When I was entering second grade, my family moved from Manhattan down to Washington, where we lived, for the first time, in a genuine house.

It had an alley in back, where all the children met to plot their various assaults on the neighborhood. A pair of wild brothers named Fletcher and Lyon governed the alley. They generally liked my brother and me, but when they ran out of other children to torment, they occasionally turned on us — stole our bikes, made fun of our haircuts and clothes, blew up our mother’s flower beds with firecrackers.

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David Rivers was an electric guard for Notre Dame.Credit
University of Notre Dame

Fletcher and Lyon had one soft spot: Michigan State basketball, because their father played there. I don’t know whether he was any good, but the man was basketball tall, that’s undeniable; he towered over my father. In the late 1970s, when we were in D.C., the Spartans were led by a thrilling 6-foot-8 point guard named Earvin Johnson, soon to be known to the world as Magic. His joyful style made him difficult to root against, though I did, with all the fiber of my being. I wanted — needed — to see Fletcher and Lyon’s hero humbled, my mother’s tulips avenged.

My agent in this was Notre Dame. While Notre Dame football inspires all sorts of powerful feelings, the basketball team has a lower profile, despite an impressive legacy. Under Coach Digger Phelps, the Irish snapped U.C.L.A.’s record 88-game winning streak in 1974, and when I started watching them on television in the winter of 1979, they featured several future N.B.A. players, including Kelly Tripucka, Orlando Woolridge and Bill Laimbeer. The starting two-guard, Bill Hanzlik, was such a clampdown defender that despite scoring just 7 points a game in college, he made the 1980 United States Olympic team and was drafted in the first round by the Seattle SuperSonics.

While Fletcher and Lyon lorded their special Michigan State status over everyone who crossed their path, I developed a deep bond with the Fighting Irish, who fortuitously met the Spartans in the Mideast Regional final of the N.C.A.A. tournament. Man, I remember watching that game at their house, pretending to be on Fletcher and Lyon’s side as they leapt up and down on their parents’ bed, delirious at every Spartans bucket, which came easy and often.

As I privately seethed, Magic & Co. rolled the Irish, 80-68, on the way to dispatching Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores and winning the N.C.A.A. championship.

There are few things in life that make you feel as low and primitive as witnessing the triumphant joy of a rival fan. Michigan State’s victory validated Fletcher and Lyon as the alpha twerps of our little ’hood. They kicked their fury up a level, lighting firecrackers and kicking trash cans. Thank God we moved back to New York the next year. It was intolerable.

Though my devotion to Notre Dame basketball was ordained from that point forward — as with all true fans, my faith was hardened by disappointment — it was powerfully reinforced, five years later, by the arrival at South Bend of a speedy point guard named David Rivers, whose stay overlapped with my enrollment at Duke, just then entering its golden age of hoops.

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Kelly Tripucka was one of many Notre Dame stars to be successful in the N.B.A.Credit
University of Notre Dame

For a Duke student — I could never refer to myself, or any grown person, as a Dukie — it is heretical not to bleed Blue Devil blue, so my children will probably have to attend Clemson for my admitting here that I did not care for the teams they had when I was a student there.

Though I have come to respect Coach Mike Krzyzewski in the years since, I regarded him at the time as a scowling martinet who robbed the joy from basketball. His key players from that era, Danny Ferry, then Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner, were his cold, surly acolytes on the court, and I just couldn’t share the pleasure so many of my classmates took in painting their faces blue-and-white and camping out for days to get a prime seat at the Carolina game. They were called Cameron Crazies (after the name of the Duke arena), and I agree, they were crazy.

Rivers, on the other hand, was the model of anti-Krzyzewskiness, an improvisational genius. A barely 6-foot playgrounder from St. Anthony in Jersey City, the same high school as Hurley, he could not be contained by the opposition, or his own coach.

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“Ultra-quick and totally unpredictable, Rivers was a point guard from a video game (and I mean a video game from the ’80s, when nobody cared how realistic they were),” Chuck Klosterman wrote in a ranking of the 50 greatest college basketball players for Grantland. Klosterman put Rivers at No. 49; on my list, he is No. 1. His teams at Notre Dame lacked the full complement of talent to contend with the likes of Duke, but I didn’t care. No two hours on a Saturday afternoon were ever better spent than watching Rivers try to beat vastly superior teams all by himself. More than a few times, he succeeded.

In the years since, Notre Dame has never quite reached the Magic Johnson/Duke apex of college basketball, and it has never had a player as electric as Rivers (though the awesome Chris Thomas came close). But it’s my team as much as ever.

Coach Mike Brey — a former Krzyzewski assistant with an unfortunate penchant for mock turtlenecks — has done well without the ability to land truly top-tier recruits. A couple of years ago, led by the ferociously competitive shooter Ben Hansbrough, now with the Indiana Pacers, the Irish broke into the top 10 and looked poised for a good run in the N.C.A.A. tournament, only to bow out early, as they seem to do every year now. This year’s stars are a bear-size boy scout named Jack Cooley, the latest in their long line of colossal white guys with a soft shooting touch, and a point guard named Eric Atkins who shows occasional flashes of David Rivers’s wizardry.

I have no idea what became of Lyon and Fletcher, but I still think of them, as well as the Cameron Crazies, when I sit down to watch Notre Dame play basketball. And of my father, too, because I understand now that what he got from Yale football is exactly what I get from the Fighting Irish — that feeling of being back in touch with my younger self.

Hugo Lindgren is the editor of The New York Times Magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2013, on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Rooting for Fighting Irish, Even While at Duke. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe